We at PractiTest were very excited to hear what Radwin’s Kfir Hemed had to say about us. Hemed is head of the Verification Unit at Radwin, a world leading communications equipment vendor. His team has been using PractiTest for large scale testing cycles.

In Hemed’s own words:

“I liked the product, the simplicity, the ease of use. I decided to run one set of tests for a month and see how it goes. After the first trial we tested a bigger version, and only after that went smoothly – we moved all of our testing to PractiTest.”

“We never had a system crash or slow down. It’s easy to deploy – the logic of the system and the UI are clear – and the learning curve is very quick. This is very beneficial for us because we frequently loan testers from other departments, and they start using PractiTest in no time.”

“The results are effective and better managed testing cycles: accurate planning that is executed on schedule, with clear logging of each and every test, issue and bug. With an average cycle exceeding several hundreds tests – that’s a big advantage.”

Read the full case study here.

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Does your team have automated tests?

• Do you run automation as part of your tests?
• How do schedule and execute your automated scripts?
• Do you generate reports out of your automation?  Do you do this together with your manual tests?

It’s great to see how test automation is becoming more common in today’s testing organizations.  Something that used to be mainly a buzzword in the industry, is becoming a helpful tool to many teams around the world.

Regardless if you use Selenium, QTP, or even home-brewed scripts, automation is more and more a part of everyday QA life.  Even though it is still far from being a Silver Bullet, as many tool vendors want us to believe, it allows to streamline our processes and to develop more stable products, helping us release high quality products faster than before.

The problem is that, in order to make proper use of automation you need to manage it and integrate it into your overall testing process. For example, you need to understand what part of your tests are automatic vs. manual; or sometimes you are asked to generate reports that will show your stakeholders the overall testing status of your product (regardless if the test is automated or not!).

What were we looking to solve?

After getting a number of requests from users to expand PractiTest’s functionality to manage (also) automated tests we started searching for the best possible solution.

Basically we wanted to come up with an approach that would allow users to:

1. Manage their tests and runs, whether manual or automated, in one place.
2. Increase the visibility of the automation efforts and teams, eliminating any communication or coordination issues.
3. To see the results of all my tests in one place, creating comprehensive reports.
4. Providing a solution that is simple to deploy and flexible enough to manage as many tools as possible.

Our solution – the xBot automation agent

So, after talking to our users and reviewing many possible approaches we chose to develop what we call the xBot automation agent, a small java utility that runs on every OS (Windows, Mac, Linux) and is able to execute scripts written on any tool or any language.

Users who want to run automated test simply map their automation scripts to tests in the Test Library, they then create a Test Set with their scripts, and schedule the time when they want their tests to start running.  When this time arrives the xBot gets from PractiTest the order to execute the scripts locally.  Finally after each test is run, the agent uploads the results to PractiTest as part of the test execution log.

Public release of the xBot agent

In the beginning of the year we started a private beta with a limited number of customers who had asked for this functionality.  Later on, in February, we released the public beta in order to get more feedback on the solution.

In May and June published a number of posts in our QAblog, linked-in and other forums, asking testers what are their biggest challenges when coordinating automated and manual tests.

Now, after taking the feedback from the Beta and the inputs from the web, we are proud to release this new solution to support automated testing via PractiTest.

We hope you’ll like our solution and invite you to keep providing us your feedback.  Here’s more information about the xBot and PractiTest’s support for Automated Tests.

Last week in Tel Aviv we had a SIGiST’s (Special Interest Group in Software Testing) quarterly meeting, where QA managers and engineers gather to see presentations from selected QA groups and talk about various topics related to our testing work and its day-to-day challenges.

During this session we had the chance to, among other ineresting presentations, see a very informative and consice presentation on how Delek uses PractiTest to manage their exploratory testing efforts.

As part of the presentation, Gavriel Gutshtein explained how they are able to manage their exploratory testing in coordination with the rest of their scripted testing efforts, documenting all their tests (including their exploratory sessions) in PractiTest, and providing full visibility to the team and their external stakeholders on the tasks and progress of their projects.

In addition to the way in which they use PractiTest he also talked about how, by blending scripted and exploratory testing, they are able to reduce their total testing efforts and at the same time increase the stability of their released products.

Hi,

This weekend we released a new version of PractiTest with many features requested during the last couple of months.

Dashboard
- Added the option to create a Private Dashboard tab where each user can define the graphs and information he wants to see.
- Dashboard graphs are now clickable and will allow users to “zoom-in” and see the data behind the specific pie or graph displayed.  So, for example, in a pie chart of the bugs for your release you can click and see the specific ones that are in status rejected or open.
- We added the ability to personalize which dashboard tab you want to be displayed by default on each of your projects.
- Added new dashboard items for test instances.

Exporting, Reporting and Printing
- We added the ability to print specific issues, tests, test sets and requirements straight from the form.
- Expanded the support to export specific custom views from all the modules in PractiTest.

Test Execution
- Users can now see the attachments defined in the test library as part of the test instances running within a test set.
- We added a visual indication when adding test instances to your test set whenever a specific test is already part of the given test set.

General
- Improvements to the Multiselect fields.
- Plus a number of additional smaller features and fixes.

As the amount of feature requests grows from month to month we’d like to remind and encourage you to use our User Feedback Forum in order to let us know what additional functionality you’d like to see in PractiTest.  Remember that this forum is there not only to add your own requests, but also to vote for the features requested by other users that you’d also want to see in PractiTest.  This in turn will help us plan and prioritize our work based on your priorities.

Feel free to let us know what you think by leaving comments and sending us your feedback!